


Sun-Man

by vulcansmirk



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-29
Updated: 2014-05-29
Packaged: 2018-01-27 01:52:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1710650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcansmirk/pseuds/vulcansmirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>STID alternate ending: Kirk stays dead for a while. Spock reflects on his loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sun-Man

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this for my short story class and then realized later what it was. Whoops. It was an accident, I swear. (I just live and breathe these two assholes.)

Anyone who spoke to him walked away with sunburns. It was a curious thing; one stood within his gravitational field—indeed, one was drawn toward him, as to a star—and became captivated, pulled into conversations as hot and as self-sustained as the churning core of something unimaginably massive. There was a feeling like freefall, a kind of wobbly sickness in one’s stomach and a lightness inside one’s skull, and it felt like an orbit, a revolution. One always came back into the silence with an itch, like flaking skin, like fingertips tracing gossamer lines along limbs.

I was the most vulnerable. My skin is so pale, after all. And though I am accustomed to a heated environment, having grown up in temperatures largely exceeding 302.15 Kelvins, there was nothing quite like the energy he put out. It sang and it singed and it sizzled and it sweltered. _Sultry._ That is the word. Not with the usual connotations attached, though there was a fair amount of that as well. To that, also, I was inexplicably drawn. I have never before felt the inclination, but to him, I was a night-blooming flower given a single droplet of the honey-colored dawn, realizing slowly what I had been missing, leaning into the light. Verbal conversation between us became almost obsolete after a time. All I needed was his eyes, like two drops of water with the dusk refracted through them—his eyes told me everything. I wonder if mine were worth as many words.

I could not write him poetry. I wrote him music, though, and perhaps they are the same. Whether he ever guessed his role in inspiring my compositions, I do not know; whether I wished he would, I know even less. What I wrote was often haunted, darkened cathedrals reverberating with long-dead voices, whispering with shifting cobwebs. At times, it was hopeful, raindrops finding their clumsy way down through a canopy of leaves. Once I attempted merely to capture his essence, but it was too multifarious—I had written twelve harmonies before I ceded defeat. Much of the time, quiet suited me better. Simply to observe him, I thought, was its own calling, just as the universe creates sentient beings whose sole purpose is to discover what made them: I discovered more of him every day, and it was the closest approximation I had to religion.

But perhaps I only glorify him now because it is all past. Truthfully, he was arrogant. He was starlight, and he knew it; he walked as though his feet bred hallowed ground, as though his privileged position at the core of all things was his right, and an irrefutable fact of his existence. He _knew_ he was the center of our system, and that each of us remained close to him not by choice, but by natural law. He took advantage of it, sometimes. But he did have a good heart. And just as we needed him, he needed us. I think that, overall, he derived more energy from others than others did from him. I think he was once well-acquainted with silence.

When he was with us, it was never silent. His very presence seemed to generate a low hum that made everything around him a little brighter, a little quicker. He was the sun, giving energy, giving life to all around him.

Everything is cold now. We are all itching in the dark.


End file.
